Should Elizabeth II end the monarchy?

An impression that I can’t shake the more I learn about the personal histories of people in the British royal family is that it has mostly been awful for them, and they might benefit as much as anyone from the abolition of the institution.

That makes this argument from Polly Toynbee more plausible: Clearly Britain loses more than it gains from the monarchy. Let us be brave and end it.

The only real argument I perceive for maintaining the institution is the idea that it’s a source of unifying stability within U.K. or Canadian or Commonwealth society. It’s the old argument against the French revolution: that things hallowed by tradition have an importance understood in culture more than it could be expressed in explicit rational argument, and that those seeking to design their institutions of government from whole cloth through rationality risk veering into tyrannical violence and social breakdown.

Arguably it’s an institution that can’t maintain its dignity in the absence of deference from the press, politicians, and the public. When society’s institutions are willing to reveal rather than conceal their weaknesses (I remember the character Charles saying something snotty in some docu-drama about not intending to be the first Price of Wales without a mistress) then their ordinariness transcends the high social status conferred on them by tradition and precedent.

Remembering as a process in the present

I want to persuade you that when you have a memory, you don’t retrieve something that already exists, fully formed—you create something new. Memory is about the present as much as it is about the past. A memory is made in the moment, and collapses back into its constituent elements as soon as it is no longer required. Remembering happens in the present tense. It requires the precise coordination of a suite of cognitive processes, shared among many other mental functions and distributed across different regions of the brain. This is how Schacter, one of the pioneers of the approach, sums it up:

We now know that we do not record our experiences the way a camera records them. Our memories work differently. We extract key elements from our experiences and store them. We then re-create or reconstruct our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them. Sometimes, in the process of reconstructing we add on feelings, beliefs, or even knowledge we obtained after the experience. In other words, we bias our memories of the past by attributing them emotions or knowledge we acquired after the event.

Fernyhough, Charles. Pieces of Light. HarperCollins, 2012. p. 7

Memory and consiousness

Without our memories, we would be lost to ourselves, amnesiacs flailing around in a constant, unrelenting present. It is hard to imagine being able to hang on to your personal identity without a store of autobiographical memories. To attain the kind of consciousness we all enjoy, we probably rely on a capacity to make links between our past, present, and future selves. Memory shapes everything that our minds do. Our perceptions are funneled by information that we laid down in the past. Our thinking relies on short-term and long-term storage of information. Creating new artistic and intellectual works depends critically on reshaping what has gone before.

Fernyhough, Charles. Pieces of Light. HarperCollins, 2012. p. 4–5

Fry on the brain and memory

It may not be easily accessible to non-Audible subscribes, but Stephen Fry’s 12-part series “Inside Your Mind” is thought-provoking, informative, and excellent. He does a great job as a science popularizer and communicator, sharing experimental research without jargon and in a consistently accessible and engaging way.

So far, I have found the episode on memory to be especially intriguing, with the idea that memories aren’t records stored in static form like journal entries but rather ephemeral in-the-moment creations arising from the work of many parts of the brain, and neurologically very similar to imagining a future situation.

Fry associates the idea with Charles Fernyhough’s “Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts”, which I have added to my non-dissertation reading list.

The antivax insurrection

For weeks or months last January, my ability to focus and be productive was sharply impaired by constant fear about what would happen in the United States.

Now it’s the less frightening but far more personal anguish about what will come of the ongoing alt right insurrection in Ottawa.

It’s painful because of what it implies about the future of Canadian politics, and because I know friends in Ottawa are being harmed. Even more, it demonstrates human beings’ deeply maladaptive tendency to amplify societal disruption through radicalization into conspiracy theories and sociopathic behaviour.

The only solution to our global challenges is to respond to disruption with cooperation while continually updating our understanding of the world on the basis of solid scientific knowledge. The path from here is there is not visible.

Rogue waves

The sea presents no end of dangers to ships and mariners, and surely one of the most frightening and unavoidable are rogue waves at least twice the height of the significant waves around them. The first to be detected was the 1995 Draupner wave, recorded from a North Sea oil platform off the coast of Norway with a maximum wave height of 25.6 metres.

A 17.6 metre wave, which was even more aberrant in comparison to the waves around it, was detected off Vancouver Island in 2020.